Why Painting Tumors Could Make Brain Surgeons Better

(NPR.org) – September 12, 2013: Perhaps one of the most uncomfortable things a doctor has to tell patients is that their medical problems are iatrogenic. What that means is they were caused by a doctor in the course of the treatment.
Sometimes these iatrogenic injuries are accidental. But sometimes, because of the limits of medical technology, they can be inevitable. Now, a medical researcher in Seattle thinks he has a way to eliminate some of the inevitable ones.
James Olson is a physician at the Seattle Children’s Hospital, where he primarily takes care of kids with brain cancer. He’s also a cancer researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
MRI reveals the location of a brain tumor. But it’s one thing to see the tumor in a scan, quite another to find the tumor in a living brain. Olson says that today, surgeons splay open the brain in an effort to find exactly where the tumor is.
Just doing that can cause problems. And the surgeons can’t always tell tumor cells from healthy brain cells, so inevitably the thorough doctors remove some healthy cells too.
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Why Painting Tumors Could Make Brain Surgeons Better was last modified: August 12th, 2015 by Geoff Duncan

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A blog about children's cancer survivors, fighters and supporters, and the cancer research that accelerates the search for cures.